


Woodcarving

by justapal



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: (Ryou's Canon Wounds), Body Sharing and the Associated Dissociation/Identity Confusion, Descriptions of Healing Cuts; Scabs; Impairing Wounds, Grief/Mourning, Insults Fighting and Making Up, Learning Not To Throw Your Anger On Others, M/M, Minor Injuries, Mourning the Loss of One's Fine Motor Skills, Serious Injuries, Sharing a Body, Strong Language, That's Where Most of the M Rating Comes From, Vivid nightmares
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:33:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21869842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justapal/pseuds/justapal
Summary: “Do you want me to help you,” Ryou said very slowly, “or not?”The Spirit’s picked up a new hobby. Ryou’s got some thoughts on it.
Relationships: Bakura Ryou/Yami Bakura
Comments: 24
Kudos: 44





	Woodcarving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finally here! After months of work, I bring you the first part of _Woodcarving._
> 
> Special thanks to Cat and Kiddo, for their mountains of love and support and [enjoyable brainstorming](https://justryou.tumblr.com/post/187315413671/also-a-fun-bonus-hc-i-have-for-bakura-i-was), and to SadistiKitteh, for giving me great feedback when I was stuck on a few important parts <3

“Here, do you want to try this?”He picked the box up by a corner, bringing it close enough to squint at. “It’s yarn. You can make animals out of yarn. A cat, I think. It looks easier than wood, if that’s what you’re struggling with.”

What did the Spirit _see_ with? What would it take to get him to? For a second, Ryou simply stood in the aisle, pink box in hand, his brows furrowed deep in thought.

The thing was _way_ too clunky to be this light in his hands, but hey, it was a craft kit, it looked easy, and he didn’t think the Spirit could screw it up that badly. It had three whole good points already.

So Ryou said, “Yes? No?” Did the Spirit even _want_ it? He lowered the kit down, holding it near the Ring.

And, well, waited.

After a moment of nothing, Ryou poked it with the edge of the box. The prongs just jangled a little, clattering on each other and his sweater.

Ryou grunted a low, dragged out sound. “It’s really hard to talk to you if you don’t give me something to work with, you know?”

Still nothing. The Ring and the Spirit both remained quiet, and Ryou puffed more air out his mouth, rolling his eyes after. _Figures._ He stuffed the box in his shopping basket while he looked around, wondering if the Spirit was listening, if he was even _awake_ —until he landed on a woman scowling at him from the end of the aisle, one hand on a shelf and the other hovering close to her lip.

He pinched at his silent earbud chord and mouthed “Speakerphone,” to her, because people bought that, he’d found. She turned around like she was embarrassed about being acknowledged, anyway, so Ryou huffed and left it at that and went on his way.

_Maybe he’s not even awake,_ Ryou thought again, going down the fabric aisle. _Does the Spirit need to sleep? Do you need to sleep? Spirit?_

_No_ , mumbled out in his mind, and for a split second, Ryou couldn’t tell if it was the Spirit or himself thinking that. They didn’t sound that different, when it was just thinking thoughts inside their shared head.

Well, his head.

Shared mindscape?

Hmm. Brain stuff was a hassle to differentiate, but if the Spirit was listening, he’d talk back _eventually_ , right? 

Right?

With a huff, Ryou ventured down the side aisle adjacent to the fabric ones. He rubbed at his hands for the fifth time this trip maybe, but it wasn’t like he could help it. He just did it automatically, most days, when he was alone or when no one was looking. Without even realizing it, most of the time.

“You could tell me what you’re looking for,” he said, rubbing hard at his own fingers—at the bandage over his palm, and the scabs lining the sides of his fingertips. Where they’d come from, who could’ve known. He’d figured he’d been carving when sleep deprived again, but thinking it over...

He used to think it was just random occurrence before, if he ever did think about it, which he was starting to think he just thought a lot of things were that really weren’t—things that maybe, _could_ be, the Spirit’s doing. There were too many questions, too many connections. Not enough doubt to dismiss it, anymore.

The only thing he had to do, now, was talk with the Spirit about it.

Which was easier said than done.

“Oh—what about clay?” The _clay_ aisle, an old friend. A much easier medium than wood, that was for sure. Ducking in a few steps to lift the first thin, colorful box he could find, he said, “It’s a lot easier to mess around with _and_ you can add clay back at any time. You don’t have to worry about shaving things too far down, again.”

Heck, why hadn’t he thought of this for himself? He hadn’t used polymer clay in ages. Not since he’d been a kid, making fish and dinosaurs with Amane.

Which… Oh.

Hm.

Ryou mouthed on his bottom lip, biting around with his teeth, but the Spirit _still_ wasn’t saying anything, and this was just getting him empty tingling in the back of the neck— 

“Come on, it’s much more forgiving. You’ll like it.” He shook the box a bit, felt the hunks of clay bat at the inside of blue cardboard. “This one even has colors, you won’t have to worry about painting them on.” As if Ryou himself didn’t struggle with this. He dumped it in the basket and walked faster now, rambling, “Just don’t grind any of it into the carpet, that’s a chore to try and clean out, really, even with the plus side of you not having to worry about hurting yourself with a knife over and over a—”

His windpipe crushed up out of nowhere. 

“Ghhk—!” He stumbled, words choked off and parched, clawing a moment at his neck. _The rope._ The moment he grabbed onto it, the pressure from the Ring lightened up, but it still took him a second to shake the sudden thudding of his blood from his head.

Whoever had yanked the Ring had yanked him a good few steps, likely trying to snatch the whole gold necklace and all by dragging it off him, only for him to end up in the wood ai—

The _wood_ aisle, of all things. Where absolutely no one was present.

“Wh—” His face fell, something disgruntled, maybe dull, coming over him. “Hello?” _Like they’d stick around._ The aisle was empty, no matter how Ryou turned to look through it. “He _llo?_ ” Who would even— 

Wait.

“Spirit?” It startled him, how fast he looked down at the Ring, how hard his heart throbbed into thumping. “That was you, wasn’t it? Spirit?”

The Ring dangled there, prongs barely swinging, and Ryou waited and waited and tried to breathe through the throbbing getting louder— 

“Come _on._ Give me something to work with. Talk to me.”

The Ring didn’t, and Ryou grit his teeth on a growl.

_Fuck._ “Come on, do it again, if you’re not going to talk. It was something here, wasn’t it?” He all but shoved the Ring around, like a demented swirly, and—no, you know what? He _did_ shove the Ring in there, prongs scuffing on the plastic shelf as he did. “What was it? Something here? It was here, with the wood, right?”

All Ryou saw were piles of blocks. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure _what_ the Ring had tugged at, but it was something on that rack, so he hogged as much of it as he could fit in his arms and dogpiled it into his shopping basket, like a fool, to get him to _do_ it again.

He shoved the Ring in there, too, scuffing the basket edges as he did, but nothing, not a single thing, happened.

“What do you _want_ from me?” It came out hard, kind of choked.

The Ring did nothing, and Ryou felt numb, disconnected, _divorced_ from his own body, for a moment. Completely and totally out of sync with it. Then he was simply there, with a heavy sort of heat in his chest. His mind felt stiff. He couldn’t budge past the hurdle of it.

“Please,” he said, with a bit of a desperate hum. “C’mon,” he muttered. “Give me _something_ , at least. Anything. I’ll take anything, Spirit.”

The Ring only stayed warm from Ryou’s body heat. Otherwise, it felt utterly cold.

-

He noticed it around noticing the blackouts again, which was a slow thing to figure out once, let alone a second time. He was getting better at it, at least; at picking up things he wouldn’t have otherwise, and not laying in bed all day when he had nowhere to be. The only thing he didn’t have was an exact time frame for when it must have _started_ happening, given the fact that he hadn’t, well, even been looking for it in the first place.

And really, Ryou was too busy spacing out through windows to have noticed it. Just watching the trees far down near the ground, ragging on himself like, _why can’t you just do it, just make it happen, it used to be so easy so what’s the problem_ , while his vision went fuzzy enough that he didn’t process any of it and didn’t try to.

Then he was looking through his trash, and found another half-carved, uneven-legged hippo-bear in its contents.

It was the regular day for cleaning. Right before trash day, the have-to day, so hell, it wasn’t _strange_ for Ryou to be going though the craft room bin. The first time he found something there, he’d been a week behind on getting the garbage out anyway, so he figured he just forgot what he’d even been trying to do with the thing and scrapped it in the bin (and also, quite literally, from his brain).

And since he seemed to be forgetting what he was even putting in the trash, well, sure, he kept checking that now before dumping it, just in case whatever made it in there could be salvaged when he was done being angry at it.

But the trash added up. The signs he hadn’t even thought to connect to it, _and_ the literal trash—and the lack of blocks of wood he’d been sure he’d had around, and the way there was never enough sycamore when he finally got around to trying to use it, and the way his hands would throb like a frustrating day’s work of trying to steady his grip, without a single thing or memory to show of it.

Ryou’d found more than a few clumps that looked like misshapen animals in the bin in his craft room, and this time had been no different. He took it out, he put it back on his desk and forgot about it—until he found it there again days later, in the trash, with a good few new stab marks in it.

His brows furrowed up. His face scowled, jaw going tight. _I have no memory of this place_ , his mind said to him _._ Trust him to think in memes, when the rest of him felt too shallow for thought.

The small, dark piece sparked no recognition, not even as Ryou turned it over, studying the grooves with his fingers. He couldn’t be forgetting this much. Not _this_ often, right? He would’ve remembered getting pissed at these uneven edges, this lack of cohesive smoothness. He’d done it enough to himself back when he’d tried to carve that diorama, after the game with Yugi and the others. Carving hurt. He missed having fun with it.

And he realized, quite slowly but suddenly, that he couldn’t remember a time when he’d actually sat down to carve anything like this. Not even in the middle of the night, when he was sleep deprived and could realistically lose the memory of doing it.

Not recently.

Not nearly enough times to make this many false starts.

And yet this was the fourth or fifth figure, the tenth or eleventh time he’d dug something out. And if he wasn’t doing it, then he had no idea who could be, because it wasn’t like he had a roommate or anyone living with him—

Besides the fact that he kind of, actually, in a way sort of did.

-

_Fuck you, this should be easy, piece of shit cunt wood, just fucking remember, just fucking—_

He awoke slowly, tension thrumming through him. It tightened, and burned, and fuck, it really _was_ shitty, this piece of cunt wood. Force crushed up his arm; like vines, like veins, scraggling up the insides of his wrists from how hard his hands clamped on the thing.

_Shitting cunt,_ he thought, and yeah, yeah, Ryou swelled with it, mind growling low. It should’ve been _easy_. Dark hands with pale palms filled his mind, so unlike the ones in front of him, all light and awkwardly pink, and yet—more familiar than his own, right then.

And they held a blade. He hadn’t been allowed to, not until he was older, yet those hands made it look easy—just digging and nicking at wood like that, right?

_It should be easy_. The knife whittled circles into the croc, scales on its back, and he reached out with tiny hands—dark, too—to touch them, but the croc and the hands swung away from him.

Instead, a palm ruffled his hair; someone gave him a thick smile, teeth faint, and though the words were unintelligible—

—s _upposed to teach me? Was he supposed to teach me?_ —

—that voice was utterly warm.

_Fucking_ —

What was this? Ryou grunted when his knife snagged on wood, slipping into that ache again. Without any conscious effort he flowed into and out of clamped hands and rigid joints, losing his grip on the feeling, growing more aware of this—and yet it permeated, still, throughout him; like joining the flow of people crossing the street, intimate and far removed from each other, and for a moment, more instinctively a whole than their own.

And all the while, this nameless ache permeated through his chest, faint and then dull again.

He knew, but didn’t know, this person. This feeling, too.

_Who is he?_ He _knew_ him from somewhere, he just couldn’t place him, couldn’t remember him, as if the thoughts weren’t entirely his own— 

And the ripple of that thought came back at him, terse and suddenly stiff.

_What,_ some other voice said. And then, _What the fuck,_ and the Spirit shoved Ryou out _hard_.

He had nowhere to go, though—he just jolted in place, out of sync with his bones, crawling in a feeling of his skin twisting awkwardly and not being screwed on right. The ringing in his ears blared loud through his head. 

And the Spirit blared sharper through it, saying, “What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing, Host?”

_Oh,_ Ryou said. It didn’t come out loud. He scowled his brows down, but didn’t feel _that_ , either. _I’m—awake_.

“Yes, you’re _awake_ ,” the Spirit said, with Ryou’s mouth. He felt the snarl of _that_ , wrinkled over his own face but so— _distant_. “Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

He could have said something about how the Spirit didn’t lock him out this time (and how strange that was for him, if he thought about it), and maybe some part of Ryou already did, just by thinking it, because the Spirit reacted all the same.

He scoffed, the sound scraping dull, tickling, at the back of Ryou’s nose. “I figured you’d still be asleep, what with your night owl schedule.” The knife snagged when he dug, again. When the Spirit dug with it, not Ryou, sawing now to get whatever chunk that was off that was bugging him with his bandaged hand. “Give me a few hours of _quiet_.”

Despite hearing it, Ryou didn’t process much of it. He was still stuck, staggering behind, the thoughts flowing but as blurred as his focus—

_Who was that?_

—and still lagging on his last coherent thought.

The Spirit ignored him. His grumbling at his lopsided little piece gave Ryou the chance to congratulate himself, however emptily, on guessing right that the Spirit had been messing with things at his desk, anyway. The shavings and chunks of wood littering his supplies irked him all the same.

_Hey._ Ryou scowled, but it only really felt like dull, pointed bubbling. Something simmering. _You’re going to give me nerve damage._

“Tough luck,” the Spirit mumbled.

_Give me my voice back._

“No.”

His voice was being a prick. _You’re a prick_ , Ryou said.

Something like a sneer, but not quite, tugged low at Ryou’s lips, like some sort of grumbled frown. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you.”

_I would. I do_. He paused. _What are you even doing? Just use the other one._

“Would you just shut the fuck _up?_ ” Weight pressed down on Ryou, like a blanket of bricks trying to shove him to sleep. That _had_ to be the Spirit. Ryou scowled, growled, shoved back at him and shoved him off.

The pressure on his skin—skin?—lifted up, like Ryou’s lungs suddenly had three times to room to move again.

The Spirit, meanwhile, stayed quiet. After a moment, he muttered a snort, flicking Ryou’s wrist enough that Ryou could feel it almost as clear as if he were doing it. Huh.

_What the heck was that?_ Ryou tried to yank his hand back—the Spirit flicked the same wrist and shunted his attempt at a grip. _You really think you can just shove me out?_

“Was worth a shot,” the Spirit grumbled. He scraped flakes of sycamore off, now. Careful, and much, much too slow. Ryou knew the feeling—his thumb would slip around without doing that, and his whole grip would follow. The Spirit was doing everything Ryou did to steady himself.

And in realizing this, Ryou couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just… sat there a moment, watching him. Maybe this was how the Spirit’s days went, just watching and not needing to talk to him.

_Huh_ , Ryou mumbled. It was… kind of boring. Extremely boring, if he were being honest. He could only look where the Spirit was pointing his eyes, but at least his desk didn’t look too messed up. The Monster World figures he had lying around looked okay. His paints were in order.

It was really the wooden blocks that were thrown around and messed up, and the wood chips and shavings littering the table that made it look dirty.

Another thing Ryou’d have to clean up, he supposed.

“Don’t think so loud,” the Spirit grumbled.

What?

“I said don’t _think_ so loud, I’m _concentrating._ ”

_That wasn’t meant for you, geez._

“Hmph.” The Spirit dragged the blade down one side of his figure—which looked like a back to some creature, if he was being generous. Ryou squinted, but as expected, his eyes didn’t respond. 

_What are you even trying to make?_ Ryou asked. _A crocodile? Was that it? Are you trying to make one like the guy did in your—_

“ _Nngh_.” The Spirit gritted his teeth hard and grunted, tearing a strip of wood from the block with a dig from his knife; the whole thing crackled out sideways in splinters and Ryou all but gawked where he watched.

_What are you doing?_ Ryou’s nerves wriggled quite uncomfortably. _Holy shit, you’re going to crack your whole piece open—_

“Nobody _asked_ you.”

_Your form’s terrible_. _Really terrible, actually. Did he never show you what to do or something?_

His heart clenched up in his chest in a way that wasn’t really his own, and between that and the way the Spirit crushed Ryou’s fists up on knife and wood and the way his mouth tightened, in some distant, stinging way—

_Ghh!_ This time, the shove was _much_ harsher, squashing the breath out of him.

_Get out,_ the Spirit said, monotonous, terse.

Ryou wheezed, and heaved, but—it didn’t really hurt. He didn’t have to breathe, if the Spirit was doing it, did he? Not here.

For a second, Ryou was pretty sure he got his mouth to twitch. _No. I won’t. I refuse._

One laugh, two, wheezed shakily out of him, with that grin stuck fleetingly on his face. His mouth crushed down on its own accord—and then the force of the Spirit swept away from him, as the Spirit went back to grumbling and carving at wood.

Ryou staggered, but not that much, slipping down his own spine a little.

But that was—it, apparently. The Spirit went back to carving toward his own fingers again, his strokes turned too-stiff and sharp. When he snagged, he pushed through it, zigzagging in the wrist as he did.

No _wonder_ Ryou had so many cuts on his hands.

_If you use the good hand,_ Ryou said, _at least you’ll have a bit more control_.

“Shut up,” the Spirit grumbled.

_I’m stuck here. This is all I can do._

“You can be quiet, too.”

_If I’m whispering,_ Ryou thought, trying his best to whisper to him, _can I try talking to you?_

“No.”

_Come on._

Another scrape of wood shaving. “About what?”

About how the Spirit could carve and not screw up his hand healing? About whoever that guy was from before? _Tell me something about where you came from._ He’d take his chances, when the two of them were awake at the same time. _Or_ — _or how you got in the Ring. You can’t always have been in there. What did you do before that?_

“You’re not getting that out of me, Host.”

_Who was that guy, then?_

Terse and stiffened not to be, the Spirit said, “No.”

For a second, Ryou couldn’t think. The Spirit went back to cutting, sawing, whatever. _No… because you don’t want to,_ he said, _or no because you don’t remember?_

The knife nearly jack-hammered out his grip from how the Spirit slipped. “Don’t remember?! I _remember_. How dare you suggest otherwise.” Ryou felt a smirk tug up at his face, but it didn’t match the off-beat quiver in his chest. “You can’t remember what you had for breakfast _any_ day of the week.”

_It was probably oatmeal, or some sort of fried eggs and rice, I don’t know._ Ryou wasn’t that imaginative, lately. He had a routine. _It doesn’t matter. From what I’ve seen you can’t shut up though, so you really must not remember. Or you’d tell me. Try and scare me, maybe._ A beat. _Unless it was embarrassing._

“I don’t have time for this,” the Spirit muttered.

_But you have time to botch this many wooden figures from carving them wrong, I see._

He only felt the Spirit get rowdier, in a muffled way—very pointedly in Ryou’s direction. The single, solitary response, before the Spirit went back to scraping, and scraping, and wearing out Ryou’s whole arm, and hell, Ryou was getting sick of it.

_Here,_ he said, reaching for the hand with the knife, slipping into the veins and nerves of it. _Switch hands with me, I can show you an easier way to do this,_ with a side of _that way you won’t destroy my hands any more—_

“What are—” The Spirit clamped him down, yanking the whole arm right into Ryou’s craft supplies. “Butt out!”

_You’re doing it wrong, though._

“Butt _out!_ ”

With the Spirit clenching for control on the hand, Ryou had a split second idea to go somewhere else—so he tried for the right, nearly thumbing down on the piece. The Spirit smacked him on the table. Ryou tried again for both hands, with less luck than before. The feeling zipped out of them, his wrists going limp, but he shot enough thought down his fingers to clench them up again after.

And with that grip on the knife and figure, Ryou attempted to clench his teeth—and smiled.

“Get the fuck out,” the Spirit said, through Ryou’s tight jaw.

_Don’t think so,_ Ryou said.

The Spirit stomped. He stomped again, purposefully banging his knees on the table, but Ryou wiggled his toes and almost laughed. Even managed to kick, which the Spirit jerked down, banging his heel hard on the carpet.

And when the Spirit tried to bundle him up and push him out after that, Ryou dug his feeling into his own bones. Their body lurched, the Spirit trying to physically throw him, but Ryou managed to push his legs down and throw his head back, biting his tongue hard after. 

“Ghh—!!” His face clenched up; the Spirit’s doing. The only thing he could do. Instinctively clamping his eyes shut, and going for a pound in the wrist—the bandaged side—with very weak force right after.

Ryou just dug into their elbow to lock the arm up, so he couldn’t use pain to jar Ryou. The Spirit just hissed and _hissed._

“Fffthhh—fucking—fucking fucking—”

He kept their eyes clenched, too. Out of pain, or trying to blind Ryou? Either way, Ryou kind of cackled, and after a few of those, they burst up in his chest, even escaping through his mouth.

And the Spirit growled _hard_ to shove them down.

_Come on, that’s kind of funny,_ Ryou said.

Ryou clenched especially tight on the jaw so the Spirit couldn’t say anything right. “‘zz _not_ funny.”

“A lil pff—” Oh, huh. Ryou furrowed his brows when the Spirit pushed the mouth away from him.

Ryou jerked his elbow. The Spirit banged the other one on the table edge, a bit hard.

It just—it felt awkward, after that, Ryou mouthing one way, the Spirit clenching it the other. His own body was talking over him, the Spirit tugging in a way that their words jumbled into an unintelligible, tongue-slurring mess.

_Stop it, stop it, stop it_. The Spirit got sharper, more hysterical, by the second.

_You’re doing it_ wrong _, though,_ Ryou said.

What came out was, “Styofflooth thp,” of all things, with spit bubbles dribbling out.

The Spirit growled deep in their throat—Ryou’s throat, with Ryou’s voice. Someone slurped his tongue back in and sucked the spit back down and it didn’t even make that much of a difference in coherency. Even with Ryou putting a strenuous amount of effort into morphing his mouth back into place, it was pretty hard to make sense with the Spirit clacking away like he was chattering.

_Stop chewing on my words with your teeth,_ Ryou thought, or was it the Spirit? Or Ryou, forgetting he wasn’t him?

“Wesszz—stahh!”

_Fuck!_

“Ss-Shtahp!”

_Stop! Butt out!_ The Spirit snapped. _Just butt the fuck out for one second!_

_No_ , Ryou told him.

The Spirit screeched with his throat. Ryou clamped the mouth shut tight, and they choked on it.

The air pushing out ran out, and in petering out, someone inhaled sharp through their nose—he didn’t know who. For a moment, Ryou pictured the body itself kicking in, halfway on autopilot, trying to take care of the two self-destructive residents inside it squabbling with each other, what with how the thinness in his lungs ballooned out. 

Ryou wheezed at the thought of it. Sharp cold hit his teeth when he smiled, and the Spirit pushed a scoff through them—scraping, high-pitched.

_The fuck are you laughing for?_ the Spirit grumbled. _Shut up and let me work._

The corners of Ryou's mouth dug up into his cheeks, the feeling fleshy, bunching up around two pointing stings. Giddy sound wheezed out. “Let’s take turns with the voice.” 

_No. Fuck you._

“Let’s take turns,” Ryou said. _Better than killing each other_ , he thought.

_No,_ the Spirit said, firmer.

Ryou waited a moment. Then he lost all sense of his jaw again, and the Spirit said, “Really, what is—what’s _wrong_ with you? We aren’t friends.” 

“Doesn’t mean we can’t be,” Ryou said.

The Spirit got quiet after that, the only sign of his presence the heavy shroud weighing down inside Ryou. It felt touchy, in a way, and Ryou almost felt his eyes squinting—

“Are you staring at me?”

His eyelids let up fast. _No_ , the Spirit snapped, a bit too wavering.

Okay. Ryou’d let him have that. “I mean it, though. Just because we aren’t on the friendliest of terms—”

_I’m going to kill your friends someday._

“—doesn’t mean we can’t be. I. What?” Ryou scowled. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking.”

_I didn’t use the voice,_ the Spirit said, like he was pointing this out for him.

Ryou scoffed, unsure where the grin twitching onto him was coming from. “I would think taking turns would include the whole ‘don’t interrupt whoever’s talking’ in there.”

The Spirit hummed. _Don’t think so_. 

Despite himself, Ryou found a quiet giggle wheezing through. Maybe a few. He closed his eyes, shaking his head, and rubbed at his brow without really thinking about what it meant by the fact that he could.

Not until the Spirit said, _I meant it too. I’m going to kill your friends one day._

Ryou didn’t doubt him. “Why?”

Pause. _Why what?_

“Why are you going to kill them? Just because? Did they do something to you, besides ruin a few games you were playing?”

Like usual, the Spirit didn’t respond. This mixed up though, Ryou could _feel_ his pulsating conundrum. A bit of fear, a bit of loathing, a bit of something decidedly self-righteous in how the rage and seething tasted—all subdued and ordinary, and a little too overpowering, this close.

It was strange, suddenly having something—some _one_ —this close and spouting feelings through Ryou. They didn’t feel as shallow as he was used to, like his own emotions.

But there was very little else he could do, if the Spirit was back on his no talking shtick. So Ryou breathed. He settled into breathing, feeling the way the air wound in and out his nose, the way his lungs pushed his chest up, and the Ring on its rope, too, before sinking back down, the both of them.

The Ring was heavy, as usual. Ryou made a show of ignoring it, anyway, and idly grabbed for the Spirit’s off-center hunk of wood.

In reaching for it, he felt a sharp shot of _no_ splooge wordlessly through him.

_The fuck are you doing,_ the Spirit—well, asked.

“Looking your piece over. There’s some really easy fixes to what you’re working with, you know. What you keep messing up on.” Ryou thumbed along the sides of it—there were a number of splintered edges, too-frayed edges, but it was easy to fix _that_ , at least. “It really isn’t that hard, when you know what to do.”

In the back of his mind, Ryou felt the Spirit’s silence. His cautious bad mood. How it turned to a grumble, after a while.

“I can show you,” Ryou said.

The Spirit grumbled darker at him.

“Okay, no. You see what just happened there? You can’t push me around.” Ryou wrinkled what he could of his face, since bits of the Spirit were still coursing through it. “You’re a guest here, whether you like it or not. Whatever you choose to think this is. I think you owe me a bit of an explanation as to what you’re doing with my body when I’m asleep.”

_Hmmng_. That was it. A grunt, from the Spirit. Ryou waited, and if he concentrated enough, he could still feel the shadows of the Spirit’s presence physically radiating off of him. The way those emotions flickered through Ryou’s pulse, making it thick, uncertain. Slowed, even.

_It doesn’t matter. The why,_ the Spirit finally said. _Not to you._ If Ryou concentrated, he could picture the Spirit tapping away at something—the Ring, between his own fingers. _Just know that, if you’re trying to get buddy-buddy with me. I won’t get buddy-buddy with you_.

“Do you want me to help you,” Ryou said very slowly, “or not?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plan right now is for three parts total, the rest of which I have a good outline and drafted scenes for. I don’t know how overtly shippy it’ll end up being, but elements of it will be present, I’m sure XD
> 
> And a big thanks to you, dear reader, for getting this far <3 I’d love to hear what you think!!
> 
> And I would be remiss if I did not link Kiddo's absolutely stunning piece of artwork he did last month for my birthday for this, which you can find on tumblr here: <https://justryou.tumblr.com/post/189602744106/im-a-little-late-but-my-pic-for-justapalspal>


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